Airport authorities in the Maldives – an island nation in the Indian Ocean – said Wednesday they had “no credible information” to back up claims by several villagers that they saw a low-flying jet on the morning Flight 370 went missing.

Hassan Areef, manager of communications at the Maldives Airports Co., told The Wall Street Journal in a telephone interview Wednesday that he had no information that would substantiate the claims, which local police said they are investigating.

Malaysian authorities in a news conference Wednesday confirmed that there was no evidence to suggest that the missing jet had been sighted over the Maldives.

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Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia’s minister of defense and acting minister of transport, said that the Malaysian chief of the defense force had contacted his counterpart in the Maldives “who has confirmed that these reports are not true.”

Malaysian investigators have said a satellite ping from the missing plane at about 8 a.m. indicates it was far away in one of two possible corridors – one to the north over continental Asia and one in the southern Indian Ocean. If that is correct, Flight 370 couldn’t have been anywhere near the Maldives when locals said they saw a plane.

Mohamed Zaheem, president of the local council on Kuda Huvadhoo island, around 110 miles from the Maldivan capital, Malé, said in a telephone interview Wednesday that about five residents came to him separately on March 8 to say they had seen a large plane flying low overhead at about 6:15 a.m. local time.

That would be 9:15 a.m. Malaysia time and would mean the plane was still flying more than eight hours after leaving Kuala Lumpur. The Boeing 777 was carrying enough fuel to fly for eight hours, Malaysia Airlines said earlier, though aviation experts say the plane might have been able to fly longer depending on its speed and altitude. A direct route from Kuala Lumpur to the Maldives would take about four hours.

One islander, a 15-year-old student who said he saw the low-flying plane when he was standing outside his house on Kuda Huvadhoo on March 8 at around 7.30 a.m., said he could “clearly make out the colors of the aircraft.”

“It was mostly blue with a red stripe. Usually I can’t see the colors on planes overhead,” the student, who asked not to be named, said. The plane maintained a constant height, he said, and was traveling from the south west to the south east.

His father, a teacher on the island who did not see the plane, said his son decided to speak up about the sighting having seen news reports about the missing Boeing 777. “We thought that this might help or be a clue. That’s why we started talking,” he said.

Police officers had come to the family’s home on Tuesday to ask what had been seen, he said. A spokesman for the Maldives Police said officers were trying to verify the reports.

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